DEVOPSdigest

CyberArk announced new capabilities for reducing cyber security risk in the cloud.

CyberArk enables organizations to easily integrate privileged account security into their cloud environments and better secure and manage cloud orchestration and automation tools, such as Chef and Puppet.

Enterprises are increasingly moving data center operations to the cloud and investing in automation tools to drive DevOps initiatives, greater business efficiency and process optimization. These initiatives are increasing the overall number of privileged accounts within IT infrastructures and can quickly expand the potential attack surface. To help reduce security risk created by spinning up new environments, which often leads to the creation of default credentials, privileged account security policies must be incorporated immediately and mirrored consistently across new test, dev and production environments. Additionally, privileged accounts associated with newly created images must be secured simultaneously with the creation of these new environments.

The CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution allows organizations to secure, manage, control access, rotate credentials, monitor and audit all privileged accounts in the cloud. Working with automation and orchestration tools such as Chef, Puppet, Windows PowerShell, Jenkins and others, CyberArk helps build privileged account security into cloud environments with automatic provisioning and integration during cloud migration and on-going management. Enhanced REST APIs available in CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution v9.7 enable broader cloud automation capabilities and greater security for DevOps environments.

Used to support elasticity in the IT environment and respond to changes in demand, cloud automation tools rely on scripts to automate communication with other parts of the IT infrastructure. While securing a cloud vendor’s web management console APIs is an important step, it must be layered with securing the actual cloud automation and orchestration scripts to ensure they are authentic and haven't been tampered with. To help secure these interactions, and the hard coded credentials used in the process, CyberArk embeds privileged account security into orchestration scripts. With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, CyberArk can automatically take the new virtual machine’s built-in privileged credential and store it in the CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault.

Within organizations’ cloud environments, the rapid creation and deletion of instances and their associated administrator accounts must be closely managed. With that pace of change, organizations can’t rely on after the fact periodic scans to assess vulnerabilities. To decrease exposure time for potentially vulnerable and unprotected new accounts, CyberArk helps automatically provision accounts newly created by cloud automation tools, rotate their credentials based on company policy, and monitor and record access to that account. Working with automation tools, CyberArk can immediately apply privileged account security policies and safeguards across these dynamic environments to further limit risk.

CyberArk secures assets running in the cloud, but also integrates privileged account security into DevOps processes, facilitating cloud migrations and enabling organizations to get the full benefit of the agility and elasticity of the cloud. Key benefits of utilizing the CyberArk Privileged Account Security Solution include:

- Reduction of the Attack Surface – Manage and secure credentials required by automation tools for typical workloads without exposing credentials to the risk of compromise

- Instant Protection – Instantly provision privileged accounts in newly created instances by cloud automation tools; eliminate the need for a separate, periodic discovery process and avoid delays

- Consistent Controls – Gain repeatable processes for provisioning privileged accounts in the cloud to enable the implementation of consistent, secure controls that mitigate the risk of human error

“When investing in the business benefits of the cloud and DevOps strategies, organizations shouldn’t have to make trade-offs between speed, efficiency and security,” said Roy Adar, SVP, Product Management, CyberArk. “CyberArk is a trusted advisor and partner in our customers’ cloud migration strategies. An effective cloud strategy must include security from the beginning – not after the fact. We bake privileged account security into cloud automation tools and the processes they enable to create repeatable, reliable security that is responsive to the elasticity of these environments.”